insert text into a file after a particular line

[Anand_30]

Hi,

I have a file which contains around 8 lines of text. I have to insert the contents of this file into another file after say line number 79.

Can anyone please help me out in this.

Thanks,
Andy

[Elena Leontieva]

Andy,

Do vi of your second file, put cursor at line 79 and type ":r filename" where filename is the name of your 8-lines file.

Elena.

[Anand_30]

Thanks Elena,

I know how to do it in vi. But I have to do it in a SHELL script.

Thanks,
Andy

[curt larson_1]

lineNum=79
rfile=File2Insert
file=File2AddText

ex -s +"$lineNum|r $file|wq" file

[curt larson_1]

or

file1=file2insert
file2=text2insert
file3=tmpfile

lineNum=79

sed -ne '1,$lineNum' -e '$lineNum r $file2' -e '$((lineNum+1)),$p' file 1 > file3
mv file3 file1

[curt larson_1]

oops forgot a p for print and need to add a space so shell doesn't take the $p as a variable

sed -ne '1,$lineNum' -e '$lineNum r $file2' -e '$((lineNum+1)),$p' file 1 > file3

should be

sed -ne "1,$lineNum p" -e "$lineNum r $file2" -e "$((lineNum+1)),$ p" file1 > file3

[Hein van den Heuvel]

And if you for soem reason prefer ed:

echo "r \nw\nq\n" | ed

Or Perl (in case you want to do something fancy in determining that line number from STDIN:

#!/bin/perl
$line = 0 + shift @ARGV;
$file = shift @ARGV || die "Need line-number, File-name to insert";
open (FILE,"<$file") || die "failed to open insert file $file";
while (<>) {
print;
print if (++$i == $line);
}

Or Perl from file name on argument list:

#!/bin/perl
$line = 0 + shift @ARGV;
$file = shift @ARGV;
$orig = shift @ARGV || die "Need line-number, File-name to insert, File";
open (ORIG,"<$orig") || die "failed to open original $file";
open (FILE,"<$file") || die "failed to open insert file $file";
while () {
print;
print if (++$i == $line);
}


cheers,
hein.

[Anand_30]

Hi Curt,

I tried using your sed solution but it does not work. It is not writing anything to the tmpfile.

Can you please look into it.

Thanks,
Andy.

[Hein van den Heuvel · Accepted solution]

very simple working SED example with variables:

> cat x1
aap
noot
mies
teun
> cat x2
x
x
> export LINE=2
> export FILE=x2
> sed "${LINE}r $FILE" x1
aap
noot
x
x
mies
teun


of course ou need to escape the LINE variable name to make sure the 'r' for read is not eaten up with up.


hth,
Hein.

[Anand_30]

Thanks Hein,

It works absolutely fine now.

Andy

[KapilRaj]

file1 --- The file to be added
file2 --- The file on which file1 needs to be added.
LEN=`wc -l file2`
LINENUM=`echo "LINE -1"|bc`
cat file2 |head -$LINENUM >>/tmp/file_new
cat file1 >>/tmp/file_new
cat file2 |tail -`echo "$LEN - 78" |bc` >> /tmp/file_new

A simple way of doing it as i do not know much about sed and awk !

Kaps

[Elmar P. Kolkman]

If you want to do it that way, you could also do it without temporary files:

file1 --- The file to be added
file2 --- The file on which file1 needs to be added.
file3 --- Resulting file
line --- line where file1 needs to be inserted

LEN=`wc -l <$file2` # to prevent the filename in the output, use redirection
PART1=`expr $line - 1`
PART2=`expr $LEN - $PART1`
LINENUM=`echo "LINE -1"|bc`
(
head -$PART1 $file2
cat $file1
tail -$PART2 $file2
) > $file3